I've been toying with the thought of a kind of "Predictive Physiology:" trying to predict behavior based on archetypical physical traits found in most people. I'm not sure if this is something that has ever been researched in some great length, but i think the concept of it is intriguing.

My nephew is a knucklehead. His brother is a knucklehead, too. They should be called "The Knucklehead Brothers." But this one knucklehead is such a knucklehead that when he goes to the Knucklehead Convention, all of the other knuckleheads look at him and say, "Sheesh! What a knucklehead!"

He was a big-shot high school jock.He got his girl-friend pregnant.He was not upset by that, he was upset because he was banned from his school's sports programs.He thought he would fix things by joining the Marines.He thought he could tell the other Marines what to do, because he was a big-shot high school jock.He asked his sergeant if his orders came from President Obama, because Obama was an illegal President and he wouldn't take his orders. He would like to quit the Marines, and is thinking of not returning from leave.

His girl-friend is just as big a knucklehead as he is. Not only that, she agrees with him and says he shouldn't go back.

I fear for their child.

I think that I could keep on about this for the full 24 hours of the thread.

I'm running out of feasible stars to hang my lasso from, and the approach of pale dawn is fading them away, one by one.

(No, wait, really, this isn't as gloomy as it sounds! I swear!)

I have kept the idea of suicide as a comfort in my back pocket for the past ten years. I've never tried it, mostly because I have never made the many things I've had in my head. I've this massive backlog of words and pictures in my brain, growing for the past decade, and I've been telling myself that .... someday.... when I was fixed.... someday when I was a bit better....

I made a conscious decision, you see. I had to stop trying to live life as an adventure, make everything not matter to me anymore, and instead care only about fixing my health. So in my mid twenties, for the third time since I was 19, I took a terrible job just for the health coverage.

(I can't imagine what my life would have been like if, since hitting legal adulthood, I weren't either scrambling for crap jobs that gave me health coverage, or feeling panic, guilt, and familial disapproval when I wasn't)

I stopped drawing for the most part, because it was too depressing and frustrating to watch the decline of my abilities, too maddening to not know when my right hand would cooperate. I stopped reading books because I'd been the kid who read obsessively, and now couldn't keep my eyes or mind focused for even a full hour. It was too Flowers for Algernon an experience, and made me too emotional. I'd just sob.

So I decided to not care. I stopped caring about... well... most things. Because it kept making me upset. Because I was waiting to get fixed. Because if I only focused on that, it'd happen quicker, and then I'd be free. "Nothing matters but getting my health fixed."

I had told myself six or seven years ago that if I didn't have a diagnosis by the time I was 30, then I'd just end it all. As the date neared, I ended up being scheduled for MRIs a few weeks after my 30th birthday. I sobbed. Decided to wait it out.

Now I'm 35. I missed so much time. The older I get, the more I hurt, and the less and less likely it is that things will get better. Even it things do improve, I don't know that I'll ever be happy without being able to say that somehow, all the crap I lived through was worth it. The only way I could see such being the case is if I successfully write and draw from my life through art.

I haven't painted in years (until this week), and they are the only three paintings I have left. I'm trying to convince myself that if I sell them, I'll have to make more new art. I just wanted to sell them off, even if for a pittance, because it seems stupid to keep my paintings instead of sending them out in the world like a message in a bottle. Because I'd rather someone own it than have me hoard my own artwork.

Nobody's bid.

Possibilities and potentials, winking away, one by one.

So, instead, I'm taking the opposite path. I am going to assume I won't get better, and instead remind myself that the adventure and the art of my life are what is important. Nothing else. Health is important, sure, but secondary. It's only a means. There are other means.

Got into an argument with an anti-natalist who I thought I could have a good debate with, but he dodged questions and got into personal attacks as quickly as possible, rather than discussing things rationally. I was just interested in what he had to say, and all arguments I posed were clear, concise, and free of any kind of namecalling or politician tactics. I now understand why this guy gets banned everywhere he goes.

@agentarsenic: I had to look up what natalist and anti-natalist meant. Huh. Learn something every day.

@Rachael: Kudos to you. I wish you the very best at pursuing art to the fullest.

@MrMonk: Bloody Fucking Hell. I'm so sorry you have someone like that in your life to worry about.

@Fishelle: (from previous open mike etc) Yeah, seeing how unhealthy my parents' relationship can be depressing, but the thing that really bothers me is that his behavior is seen as normal. As just the way men are. Really? Why the fuck would anyone bother is that was normal?

@razrangel: (also previous open mike etc) Thanks. *hugs*

As for me, at work, my ear was feeling itchy as it sometimes does, and I kind of used my shoulder to itch it, and a tick fell onto the pizza I was working on. Needless to say, the pizza got tossed, I got sent to the bathroom to check for more ticks (none, thankfully), and everyone had the heebie geebies for the rest of the evening. I was told there was some blood on the tick, and that it was a deer tick, so when I go to the doctor come Monday (thankfully I already have an appointment), I'll be sure to mention it. Those things are nightmare fodder. And apparently Scott Walker won the recall in Wisconsin by almost 20%. I voted, but ah well. I'll try not to be too cranky about it, because what can I do?

@Rachael: Yeah seriously. I'm probably going to call tomorrow and ask/tell ahead of time that I want to get tested. I probably don't have to mention that Lyme disease is why I hate ticks so much. Absolutely terrifying. I also have a new mole thing that is making me nervous. Or maybe it is a weird scab? Sheesh. My body is trying to turn me into a hypochondriac, apparently.

130am in Los Angeles. Still at the theater. Just finished my report for the evening. Everyone is frustrated. Almost no one really understood how long it would take. The people who did understand did not tell everyone else. Period. Even if they think they explained it, they didn't. Actors very frustrated. I feel them lots. Designers frustrated with artists. All want to be frustrated with director but she just wants her show to be her show and can you blame her? It's going to have her name on top....

Argh.

And we are seeing the roadkill in full color on the video monitors. The lead actress is playing the artist working in roadkill, but the poor actress was looking a little green around the gills.

We can't promise no animals were harmed in the making of the show. But the actual dead critters in the (live) part of the play were dead and taxidermied before we got to them. We swear, cross our hearts and hope to die, we didn't create any roadkill for the play.

Still.

Sometimes a piece of art gets away from you and become so awesome you have to take a moment to really, really hate it. Ok. I'm going home now. Well... "home" being my friend's couch.

This morning I decided to contact someone I very deliberately haven't spoken to in 4 years. He's like fucking kryptonite for me and it's probably a bad idea but I've done it now and I can't take it back. It was probably a very bad idea. I've just been missing people a lot recently because there are people that I've let go of over the years for one reason or another and I haven't replaced any of them. I feel oddly lonely. Seeing my sister this weekend for the first time in a year has really rammed that home because there are things we do when we hang out that I don't do with anyone else, stuff I talk about that I can't say to anyone else. She's going back to New Zealand in two days and I don't know when I'm going to see her again.

So I emailed kryptonite. I don't know what I want the outcome to be, I'm sort of hoping that I don't hear back and I'm sort of hoping that I do. I'm sort of hoping that I get told what an asshole I am and that I should go fuck myself... which is a strange thing to hope for. Because I was a dreadful human being with regards to this guy - just a dreadful human being. Like, if I heard about my behavior towards him in the third person, I would be disgusted. I was out of character awful to him and in the end I couldn't take being that ashamed of myself and I felt like all I could do was cut ties entirely in order to protect both of us from each other. It was probably the right thing to do. If I am honest though, and I haven't said this out loud to anyone anywhere, I haven't really stopped thinking about that decision for the past four years. That's a long motherfucking time to feel shitty about something.

I should probably be sticking to my guns. I am probably being a moron. God I hope he's smarter than me. I just couldn't take the denial any more. There is literally no one I trust enough on this earth to talk to about this and about the gigantic fucking mess that is my relationship with him. But I don't know how to excorcise it from my brain. I have been trying to do so for nearly a fucking decade and it's tiring you know? It's fucking tiring.

Fuck. If anyone has any genius ideas on how to stop caring about something then please let me know. Time is supposed to help and it just isn't.

@badbear - lose yourself. Exhaust yourself. Forget yourself. Go. Don't stop walking/driving/going until it's all gone. You can walk in circles so long as you walk yourself to the bone - become essential. Lose the unnecessary crap. All of it. Him, it, you - gone. You gotta like yourself so first you gotta get rid of yourself - work yourself to the bone and emerge with lines to show for it. Wipe it all clean with retreat and distance. Change your email, change your name if you have to. Delete all the old contacts you ever had [except for your family and closest] and realize that now that there's nothing there, you'll need to spend time making something there and now you've the freedom to do it.

[I've just re-read this and it reads like a list of commands - sorry (!) - but I really hope this helps because that's how I did it. I've done it twice now after 3 major relationship messes. I've just come off the back of the second time and I feel much better for it.]

@ everyone - hope it picks up, all.

CANNONBILE FROM ABOVE: nah, I'm okay. I've tiny 1st World Problems but I just wanted to add advice.

Thank you, I'm sure you're right. It feels so insanely private to me that I really haven't talked to anyone about it and I'm sure that hasn't helped the exorcisim of it from my brain. It didn't really occur to me that perhaps I haven't been hard enough on myself. Usually I can talk myself out of being emotionally complicated. Or I ignore a problem until it goes away naturally. Which works more than it should.

I'm actually pretty upset and I can't reinforce enough how fucking ridiculous I am being to feel this way. And it's annoying that telling myself I'm being ridiculous doesn't seem to stop me from being so.

@badbear - I fully know that feeling. I knew the 'I'm ridiculous for feeling this way' feeling for about 3 years straight. I hope my solution isn't being too hard on the self [just the body] but I think what I try to do is to put all of my old anxieties and emotional stock into physical work/exercise + distance.

Once I'm sleeping better, [properly better, with no shitty dreams or falling asleep thinking of them thoughts, not just new-mattress better] I begin to feel better. I hope my exhaustion method can help but I know it's not for everyone. One good thing about it is that once you get to a sort of '2-jobs, little time to myself, only-necessary-eating, everything-at-my-own-pace' sorta place, you begin to feel quite calm and even a little zen.

I had a nightmare off-thee-scale last-night; It involved loads of dead mates (yes, I'm a morbidron, and reserve the right to say DEAD!DEAD!DEAD!), some little twats and a psycho I knew who injected shaving-foam into a hamster and set it on fire to pass the time whilst waiting to score (seriously!) These shits broke into my "home" when I was a toss-pot peddler of misery as a teenager, and stole my "chemistry set". The cunts knew I took my intellectual husks to the cinema every Monday-neet, to see films that you needed a degree to understand e.g The Incredible Melting Man, The Thing, The Warriors etc.

In the dream, I grabbed one of them by la genitalius, twisted them 360 degrees, and informed him I was going to rip his face-off and fook his skull. If Lord Morpheus had turned up, I probably would have used his body as a crack-pipe, and smoked Delirium's knickers!

I just got back from das klinic, where I spent hours filling in my electronic application to go into The Max Glatt loony-bin. I've been given some info on my choice of rehabs for after, and they look quite good. I saw a good lad I know and like from Portugal yesterday, riddled with cancer and aids. He did a chair in a meeting, and something this...specimen said afterwards (I know this creep, he's a sex-predator), made me want to eviscerate him. ARRGGGHH!

Fuck John Constantine, his shit is sloppy next to mine!Fuck DC for doing their pre-Watchmen comic. I don't care if it's good, or whatever...fuck 'em!And fuck me with a Bible, because I probably deserve it.